Migraine Buddy: The Profitability of Migraineurs' Pain

• In Event: Speculation and Innovation in Digital Health - I

Abstract

Migraine Buddy is a free migraine headache diary app used by over 1.3 million migraineurs. It gathers active and passive data: while users complete surveys and record migraine episodes, the app collects data on sleep patterns and locations. Informed by actor-network theory, this paper uses participant observation and content analysis to analyze the user’s experience with Migraine Buddy and contrasts that experience with the parent company’s website, healint.com, as it works to repackage and resell users’ data. Migraine Buddy does empower migraineurs. For instance, after a certain data threshold is reached, the app predicts a likely migraine and warns the user, enabling him or her to take abortive medications or other preventative actions. Migraineurs are doubly motivated to share their data because the app’s interface presents users’ digital labor as information sharing for the public good; however, this real-time data is sold by Healint to pharmaceuticals and other healthcare industries that are invested in the migraine treatment market. Healint's site reveals healthcare’s stark disparity between the goals of those who suffer and those who profit; the site promises their company-consumers that Migraine Buddy data can be used to "keep them [migraineurs] coming back...time after time." Migraineurs use the app as a path to freedom from healthcare interventions while healthcare companies simultaneously use their data to ensnare migraineurs even further in a world of medications and treatments. Healint balances between two realms—one of user empowerment and the other of company profitability—and, by translating the data, profits from them both.

Author

• Christiana Robbins, University of Southern California